Shale is an open source project. It will never *die* unless the ASF dies or kills it and nobody copies the code over to some other repository. That's one of the main reasons we like open source. It's not dependent on the existence of any person, company, or organization.
It's funny how the discussion that occurred here and on the MyFaces list has created all this buzz about "Shale is dying" and all that crap. The biggest problem we have (and I'm part of the problem) is that new people are not stepping up to the plate to contribute to the development process and many of the existing committers are doing other things and not contributing as much to the project. Of course, the project has reached a level of stability where no contribution is required to make the codebase inherently useful. Also similar architectures like Seam and Facelets are taking some Shale(ish) concepts and implementing them in other ways (with corporate support) thus making parts of Shale redundant. As Gary said some of the concepts of Shale are being introduced at spec level for the next gen of JSF and might make Shale even more redundant. So the motivation for people to step in and sling code is not necessarily huge - especially given some of the barriers to entry that are inherent in open source. I know the tone of this message is a bit short, but please don't detect any sense of anger or frustration in my thoughts. I'm just trying to explain that "inactivity != death". We're not like an infant whose arms and legs are always in motion unless he's asleep. We're more like old guys who sit on the porch and don't move unless our beer glass is empty :-) If we all stop committing for 6 months or even a year it does not mean the project is not being supported. In fact I'm using parts of it in production every day. You can bet if I find a bug I'll fix it - I just haven't found any yet in the stuff I'm using. The fact that I haven't committed to any of the other parts just means my time has been spent on other things (like watching an infant constantly move his arms and legs for no particular reason). I guess the bottom line is that Shale is not dead. If anybody is unhappy with a lack of activity then, by all means, we welcome activity. Greg
